OT: Wow is all I can say...

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Very true Aiken. Bill Gates, AKA Bill Hellgates AKA Beelzebub Gates.

No but seriously, MS has pulled some nasty tricks on PC users. Fyron summed it up very well; there is just one more thing.

WinME.

It takes all the bugs from Win98 and WinXP and combines them into a pretty much unusable OS.

And for me, being a lifetime Win95/98 user, XP was extremely user-unfriendly..... it was almost like having to re-learn working with the computer from scratch. Take, for instance, sharing a folder; in Win98 you just right-clicked the icon, clicked Share and chose a name for the shared folder, then you're done. When I try to do this in WinXP, it says I have to copy the folder into my PC's SharedDocs folder. WTF?!? I want the folder to simply be shared! Whenever I modify its contents I do NOT want to have to do it twice so that the SharedDocs version is the same as the original!

Microsoft is the worst thing that EVER happened to this planet next to Homo sapiens sapiens.

[RudyHuxtable]

Thermodyne, I can safely say that that is the longest post I have ever seen. Ever.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

RudyHuxtable said:
Thermodyne, I can safely say that that is the longest post I have ever seen. Ever.

Check a few (dozen) pages back in the SEV Wishlist. My first post was just over six pages long.

[Jack Simth]

One of the things Microsoft does that makes many people hate them:

Forced Upgrading by discontinuation and poor compatibility:
When MS produces a new versin of a program - Word, as an example - they stop producing and selling the previous versions; moreover, previous versions can't read later versions' format, unless the later version specifically saved the document into an older format. So, say you are a buisiness operating Word 97 on your 100 licensed workstations. Microsoft then comes out with Word 2000 and stops selling Word 97 licenses. Your buisiness expands a bit, and you need to outfit three new workstations. Unfortunately, you can't just put Word 97 on those three new workstations, as the license isn't available; you need to put Word 2000 on them, as that's all you can leagally get (without such measures as looking for people who are selling old copies of Word 97 licensing - wich can get rather tricky). Now documents made on those Word 2000 machines can't be read by the rest of the staff when needed - in order to make it work, the three Word 2000 stations must either always take an additional step (saving in the older format), or you must "upgrade" all 100 of the other machines. At $50 a unit for Word 2000 (I'm pulling numbers out of a hat), adding those three machines (let's say each machine costs $1000) cost you $3000 individually, but arranging them to actually work with the others in your system costs $5000 for upgrades.
Now suppose you are running a smaller buisiness that isn't growing significantly. You are running happily along with Word 97 on your five machines, and dealing with your clients. Then, Microsoft comes out with Word 2000, and stops issuing new Word 97 licenses. Now, if any of your clients upgrade, or get a new machine, you can't work with the files they send you, due to the wrong format, and you are basically left with a few options: Drop the client, Annoy the client (dude, I can't read that format - you have to save it in Word 97) (and probably lose the client, eventually) or upgrade your machines (for $50 apice that's $250).
Now note that Microsoft can do this at essentially any time they wish, with virtually any of their products, and almost any business must eventually cave, if using those MS products. In essence, the corporation can (and does, every few years) tax buisinesses at will, for whatever amount they choose. After all, Microsoft is the only entity that can leagally make new licenses for the use of Microsoft's products.
Currently, they are starting to move over to a subscription model, wherein you continually pay for the priviledge of using their products, and the corporation doesn't have to do a thing ever again to maintain your obligation to pay them. And the above tactics essentially gauruntee that, if nothing else changes, they will be able to force most buisinesses to go along with it.

[Thermodyne]

Jack Simth said:
One of the things Microsoft does that makes many people hate them:

Forced Upgrading by discontinuation and poor compatibility:
When MS produces a new versin of a program - Word, as an example - they stop producing and selling the previous versions; moreover, previous versions can't read later versions' format, unless the later version specifically saved the document into an older format. So, say you are a buisiness operating Word 97 on your 100 licensed workstations. Microsoft then comes out with Word 2000 and stops selling Word 97 licenses. Your buisiness expands a bit, and you need to outfit three new workstations. Unfortunately, you can't just put Word 97 on those three new workstations, as the license isn't available; you need to put Word 2000 on them, as that's all you can leagally get (without such measures as looking for people who are selling old copies of Word 97 licensing - wich can get rather tricky). Now documents made on those Word 2000 machines can't be read by the rest of the staff when needed - in order to make it work, the three Word 2000 stations must either always take an additional step (saving in the older format), or you must "upgrade" all 100 of the other machines. At $50 a unit for Word 2000 (I'm pulling numbers out of a hat), adding those three machines (let's say each machine costs $1000) cost you $3000 individually, but arranging them to actually work with the others in your system costs $5000 for upgrades.
Now suppose you are running a smaller buisiness that isn't growing significantly. You are running happily along with Word 97 on your five machines, and dealing with your clients. Then, Microsoft comes out with Word 2000, and stops issuing new Word 97 licenses. Now, if any of your clients upgrade, or get a new machine, you can't work with the files they send you, due to the wrong format, and you are basically left with a few options: Drop the client, Annoy the client (dude, I can't read that format - you have to save it in Word 97) (and probably lose the client, eventually) or upgrade your machines (for $50 apice that's $250).
Now note that Microsoft can do this at essentially any time they wish, with virtually any of their products, and almost any business must eventually cave, if using those MS products. In essence, the corporation can (and does, every few years) tax buisinesses at will, for whatever amount they choose. After all, Microsoft is the only entity that can leagally make new licenses for the use of Microsoft's products.
Currently, they are starting to move over to a subscription model, wherein you continually pay for the priviledge of using their products, and the corporation doesn't have to do a thing ever again to maintain your obligation to pay them. And the above tactics essentially gauruntee that, if nothing else changes, they will be able to force most buisinesses to go along with it.

New software always displaces older software. As to the problem of which you speak, it would take less than 5 minutes a system to default the three systems to Office 97 compatibility. Even Office 2003 can be defaulted to 97 settings. Again this would have to be laid at the feet of the users. A business with 100 workstations is actually an enterprise class business. As described, it would probably be Windows 98 or NT running in an NT domain. So it would be assumed that the MIS manager would have researched this and rolled it out at deployment. If it was a sneaker net, then they would already be ITdead with 100 systems. If they were running on WinProxy, Novell or one of the defunct network systems, then again, they should have known to make the changes before deployment. I can�t lay this at the feet of MS because user fail to learn what new software is capable of. I can say that planned obsolescence is bad, but such is life. Almost everything suffers from this.

Also, Office products stay in the vendor pipeline long after they have been replaced. And with that said now let me add that your example is vaporware. I can provide as many copies of Office 97 as an office of 103 systems needs at $112/copy. http://google-cnet.com.com/MS_Office...-30671582.html And I could probably throw in installation at that price if they were willing to sign a network support contract.

[Kamog]

How did you make money on MSFT stock? It has been going down steadily this year. At the beginning of January it was around $26.74 and today it's $25.09. Did you sell it short?

Anyway, it's probably not a good idea to buy MSFT right now, it's still on a down trend.

[Thermodyne]

They actually pay nice dividends. When closing out each year, one of the reports I get is a stocks income as a percentage of money invested. The return percentage for 2004 (this year) was far and away the highest I have ever been the recipient of.

The types of profits that you are speaking of do not come from keepers; MS is a keeper at the moment. These profits are made from market changes, buy low sell high. My champion of the last few years has been Rambus. They get accused of all sorts of things by the offshore memory foundries and the stock goes to rock bottom. They have their day in court and walk out with huge royalty awards; stock takes off like a rocket. A few weeks latter it returns to more or less its true value. In and out in less than two weeks with 10%+ returns.

[Thermodyne]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Very true Aiken. Bill Gates, AKA Bill Hellgates AKA Beelzebub Gates.

No but seriously, MS has pulled some nasty tricks on PC users. Fyron summed it up very well; there is just one more thing.[/i]

Actually, my friend Nolan did not sum it up well at all. He repeated the headline rhetoric that is put forth by the nix community, then failed to support his position with an expanded statement. There are many good things happening with nix, the collaborative effort is worth mention, never has something like this occurred in this industry. But IMHO, unless the nix community applies a sustainable business model to their efforts, some large corporation will reap that majority of the profits down the road.

WinME.

It takes all the bugs from Win98 and WinXP and combines them into a pretty much unusable OS.

Win ME is a good system. Sure, it�s not as good as 2K, but it addressed a lot of the problems that remained from Win 95. Problem was that the users did not comprehend the changes, and MS didn�t protect it from unsupported code. MS learned a lot from ME and we cans see these changes in 2K and XP. ME was the first true break from DOS, and as such did not support 16 bit drivers and software not specifically adapted to run in a 32bit environment. So people saw it as the next flavor of 98, and had tons of problems because of drivers and legacy software. How many of you ever bothered to the compatibility lists for ME? From a pure performance standpoint it is the fastest 32bit OS that MS has released to date. Take a look at some of the high end benchmarks that are posted on the net. If you find some guy with a nitrogen cooled CPU putting up marks at 6 or 7 GHz, they are almost always running ME. And until recently, most top video marks were run with ME. This only switched to XP when ME driver support dried up. From personal experience, I have found that ME will do intense work like Seti of Folding at Home faster than 2K or XP. Same hardware, same reference job packets, ME wins every time. The problem with ME was that it allowed the average user to hang him with ease. When they loaded an old Win95 16/32 bit game, it just rolled merrily along until the software called a 16 bit dll, then froze or crashed. Same with drivers, it would allow you to install 16bit Win95 driver with no complaint, the fail to start after the reboot. The problem with Win ME was the failure of MS to realize exactly how much people tinkered with their systems, and their arrogant belief that these same people read directions and compatibility lists.

I still us ME for Win95 upgrades. It�s cheap and runs will on down level hardware with limited memory installed. On an old PII it will out perform 2K by a noticeable margin.

A vast amount of ME problems were caused by users, and today when you try to load that old game on a 2k box, what happens? It won�t let you. When you try to load that old 16 bit sound card driver, what happens? It won�t let you.

So when people say that ME sucks, they are really just stating that ME was too advanced and too user unfriendly for them to use reliably at the time. And if IMHO, MS should have realized this when they beta released it. Whoops, I forgot, they didn�t do that kind of stuff back then, everything was a big secret in the software business during that time. But all things change, now OS�s are beta tested, across several builds before being put on the retail shelf. I think I�m on the 3rd build of beta 64bit Windows now. In the old days they would have released it and then started patching. Things do change for the better.

And for me, being a lifetime Win95/98 user, XP was extremely user-unfriendly..... it was almost like having to re-learn working with the computer from scratch. Take, for instance, sharing a folder; in Win98 you just right-clicked the icon, clicked Share and chose a name for the shared folder, then you're done. When I try to do this in WinXP, it says I have to copy the folder into my PC's SharedDocs folder. WTF?!? I want the folder to simply be shared! Whenever I modify its contents I do NOT want to have to do it twice so that the SharedDocs version is the same as the original!

This just goes to support my post above. Many users resist learning how to use software. And strongly resist adapting to new versions. The problem you are having with shares results from the need to balance security against ease of use(mentioned earlier) and can be altered with ease.

Microsoft is the worst thing that EVER happened to this planet next to Homo sapiens sapiens.

Bold statement! I would hope that it was made in jest. If not, then I think a few hunderd words to expand on the statement would be in order. Some of you guys should use a UNIX terminal for a few weeks. Or try to do some email ala compaq AS300. Before Windows, the average person could not use a computer. I recall this state of the art 8088 we had and there was a huge book chained to the desk. The DEC tech couldn't even run it without looking up command strings. Oh it worked well, never crashed. But it would only do about 16 things and only 1 at a time. That was life before MS.

[Fyron]

Thermodyne said:

Actually, my friend Nolan did not sum it up well at all. He repeated the headline rhetoric that is put forth by the nix community, then failed to support his position with an expanded statement.

My statements were rather well informed, most certainly not just jumping on the bandwagon... I was not looking to get into any sort of debate, so I did not post anything further and do not have any plan to do so now.

[Thermodyne]

Imperator Fyron said:

My statements were rather well informed, most certainly not just jumping on the bandwagon... I was not looking to get into any sort of debate, so I did not post anything further and do not have any plan to do so now.

Shucks, I was looking forward to a good debate with you. Anyone else care to step in?